We are very pleased to announce that the OLH is now open for submissions to its new megajournal, which covers the humanities disciplines. The submission platform, developed by Ubiquity Press, is based upon PKP's excellent Open Journal Systems,
but has been extensively modified to accommodate the editorial flow
that is needed in a highly-distributed, large-scale system. We intend to
release the source code for these modifications under an open license
in the near future.

The OLH Editorial Team is made up of a network of leading academics from the international scholarly community, with Section Editors covering all of the humanities disciplines, including:

History

Theology & Religious Studies

Literature & Languages

Modern & Ancient Languages

Philosophy

Cultural Studies & Critical Theory

Film, TV & Media Studies

Musicology, Drama & Performance

Classics

Art, Design & Art History

Legal Theory

Digital Humanities

Politics & Political Theory

We are also pleased to say that
negotiations on the set of initial journals that will share an economy
of scale and our economic model are well underway. More announcements on
this front will be forthcoming in the near future. In the meantime, we
would ask those who pledged articles to now begin to submit your work!
We are aiming for a launch next year between May and Summer 2015. Thank
you for your ongoing support in the creation of an open research and
dissemination ecosystem for the humanities!

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Thomas Dwight Goodell, A School Grammar of Attic Greek (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1902). The work was scanned by the Internet Archive.
This version was created in 2013­–2014 with support from the Roberts
Fund for Classical Studies and the Mellon Fund for Digital Humanities at
Dickinson College. Bruce Robertson of Mont Allison University performed
the OCR using Rigaudon, the output of which is available on Lace.
At Dickinson the OCR output was edited and the XML and HTML pages
created by Christina Errico. Ryan Burke created the web interface, and
Meagan Ayer edited and corrected the HTML pages. The content is freely
available for re-use under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
license.

The Derveni Papyrus is the oldest known European “book.” It was meant
to accompany the cremated body in Derveni Tomb A but, by a stroke of
luck, did not burn completely. Considered the most important discovery
for Greek philology in the twentieth century, the papyrus was found
accidentally in 1962 during a public works project in an uninhabited
place about 10 km from Thessaloniki, and it is now preserved in the
Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki.

The papers in Poetry as Initiation discuss a number of open
questions: Who was the author of the papyrus? What is the date of the
text? What is the significance of burying a book with a corpse? What was
the context of the peculiar chthonic ritual described in the text? Who
were its performers? What is the relationship of the author and the
ritual to the so-called Orphic texts?

The Journal of Neolithic Archaeology provides a scientific information
platform on the archaeology of the Neolithic period. The articles are
mainly in German and English, and for all articles English summaries and
figure captions are available.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

The BIBLE+ORIENT Museum Database is a web based database created for the electronic management of ancient Near Eastern image and object data.
The numerous data fields enable not only a precise cataloging of the
museum inventory but also systematic searches for purposes of scientific
research. Furthermore, the database admits the consultation of
digitalized catalogs of the collections, the management of image series
(e.g. slide shows), the making available of dynamic e-Learning content
and the fast creation of PowerPoint presentations as well as
publications.The user has at his disposal images in an unlimited amount of views
for each object, each in the following four formats: thumbnail, normal
size, PowerPoint format and print resolution.The idea of an internet database allows not only world wide access
but also stimulates the cooperation between partners who want to share
the data with one another. The database was designed so that image and
object data from an unlimited number of institutions and private persons
can be managed. Currently, we are working on national, European and
global levels to include into our database objects from other
iconographically relevant collections as well.

Saturday, December 27, 2014

The Hawara Papyri

William Flinders Petrie excavated at Hawara in
1888. After working in Medinet el-Fayum (Arsinoe) and Biahmu, he moved
on to the site south of Arsinoe and took the 60 workers he had already
employed at the former sites with him. The results of his excavations at
Hawara were published in 1889 in his "Hawara, Biahmu, and Arsinoe". The
papyrological material said to have been found at Hawara was studied by
Prof. Sayce and published on pages 24 to 37 of that volume. Sayce gave a
general description of the great papyrus roll which contains parts of
books 1 and 2 of the Iliad (the "Hawara Homer"), emphasizing the
importance of the variants, and edited the texts of the most complete
documents, some of them in a very preliminary way.

J. G. Milne undertook a new edition of 37 of these papyri in the Archiv für Papyrusforschung
5, 1913, 378-397. He did not work on the Hawara Homer but concentrated
on the smaller literary texts and gave a proper publication of some more
documents. The texts which were not reconsidered in Milne's publication
were reprinted in Sammelbuch I (nos. 5220, 5223, 5224).

When Flinders Petrie brought his finds back to
England, the material was divided between several institutions. The
Hawara Homer was given to the Bodleian Library in Oxford (where it
still is today), while all the other papyrological material stayed in
London and was given to the Department of Egyptology at University
College London. In 1948, the young professor of Papyrology, Eric Turner
received permission from the then Professor of Egyptology, J. Czerny, to
take the Hawara papyri to the Department of Greek and Latin at UCL and
to keep them there in his custody. A letter from 16 June 1949 confirms
the transfer of the papyri. They were kept in a secret place in the
department for more than 50 years.

As usual, Flinders Petrie did not give precise
indications, as to where the papyri were found on the site. He just
mentions that the region north of the pyramid "was the usual place for
burials in the early Roman period , when gilt cartonnage busts were
used. Papyri from the Ist and IInd cent. AD are also usual in the soil
here, and for some way north" (p. 8, no. 11; cf. the map on plate XXV in
the book).

When the papyri arrived in London they were
"ironed" by Petrie's friend, Mr. Spurrell who also helped in "unpacking,
arranging, and managing the collections" (p. 4). It must have happened
then that all the pieces were glued onto greyish cardboard. When writing
was distiguishable on the back of the papyri, windows were cut out to
make the letters (at least in part) visible. In some instances, Petrie
added small notes in pencil about find-spots. In later years, Walter
Cockle removed some of the papyri from their cardboards and put them
under glass. The cardboard frames of these pieces were nevertheless
kept.

It is a desideratum to make digital images of
at least the published papyri accessible on the internet. None of the
Hawara papyri (except for single columns of the Hawara Homer, Hawara
epigrams, and the Periegesis of Attica), have ever been shown in
photographs.

JSIJ is a peer-reviewed, electronic journal dealing with all fields of
Jewish studies, which is distributed free of charge via the Internet.By publishing articles
electronically via the Internet, JSIJ seeks to disseminate articles
much faster than is possible with paper publication, and to make these
articles readily and conveniently accessible to a wide variety of
readers at all times.

Indeed, we hope that the
use of this new technology will eventually allow JSIJ to develop in
ways not available with conventional, printed journals, including the
possibility of computerized full-text searching and the use of
hyperlinks to other texts.

JSIJ will include articles
in both Hebrew and English. To render these articles accessible to as
wide a variety of users as possible, regardless of computer program or
platform, we offer two modes of "publication": via PDF files
(universally accessible) and Word 97 files.JSIJ is initially scheduled
to appear twice a year, although preliminary versions of articles will
be made available on our site as soon as articles are accepted for
publication and copyedited.

The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.

The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.

AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.